John Denham: I will.

Bill Rammell: From a sedentary position, my right hon. Friend has just assured me that he will meet the hon. Gentleman. The Government are committed to astronomy, but this matter is rightly being taken forward by the Science and Technology Facilities Council, and a consultation is taking place. I have to say that, if the Government had stepped in and established this project from the beginning, we would have been criticised for intervening in matters that were properly matters for the funding council.

Mr. Speaker: I am going to give a ruling on the matter. The Chief Whip has put the matter correctly, and I am going to close this matter down. The statement of the Leader of the House should be about the business for the next week, and perhaps the following week. I do give leeway at times because hon. Members may want to raise important issues, but it looks as though I shall have to make things tighter because such matters should not be brought before the House at business questions. There are other opportunities to do so.

John Spellar: The Minister is touching on an important issue, which is the what is happening on campuses. I should like to highlight the excellent work of the Holocaust Educational Trust, which means that students arrive on campus much more aware of the dangers. However, is there not a considerable responsibility on university authorities to take more action? The issue is not just about crime, but about that telling phrase, which I remember from my Northern Ireland days, "the chill factor"—that is, not necessarily crime, but making people feel that they are unwanted. Do university authorities not have a greater role to play in making their campuses welcoming to people, so that we can have genuine academic freedom?

Andrew Dismore: I have the honour of representing the constituency that has the highest proportion of Jewish people in the country; one in every five of my constituents is Jewish. I think that my constituency has more synagogues than any other, and they represent every strand of Jewish faith. There is none to which I cannot go, not being a Jew myself, which means that I can get a full flavour of the different parts and ceremonies of the different faiths. More importantly, I get the opportunity to speak to many different people from the Jewish community.
	My constituency has more Jewish schools than any other—it has five primaries, one big secondary school on a split site and a number of private schools—and dozens of charities, non-governmental organisations, societies, care homes and businesses. The uniting factor is that none has name plates, signs or boards outside advertising what or who it is, and we must ask why that is. It surprised me when I was first elected and I was going round trying to find those places to visit them. It slowly dawned on me that the real problem was the fear in which the Jewish community lives. Things that we take for granted as non-Jews, they can never do.
	In the past 10 days, I have attended six major functions organised for the Jewish community, all of which opened their doors an hour early. Why did they do that? They did so in order that people could trail through the enormous security measures that have to be taken. Luckily, I can usually jump the queue, although that was not the case at one of the functions. Such measures include X-ray searches and bag inspections, the locations not being announced in advance for fear of what might happen and secrecy about who may be turning up, particularly if the guest is high-profile. The exception to that occurred last week, when the Prime Minister proudly announced to the House, in response to my question on the subject, that he was going to finish what he was doing and go on that night to the 60th anniversary of Israel event. I understand that he sent his security people into a bit of a spin.
	The threat and reality of anti-Semitism is with us. We are talking not only about Islamic extremists, but about the far right, as has been mentioned, and sometimes about plain nutcases. Jewish people are the only community in our country who live in a permanent state of siege and underlying fear. Looking at it from the outside, I really started to appreciate the mentality of people who are permanently worried and looking over their shoulder. The Chief Rabbi tells a story, which he repeated earlier this week, about the telegram that is sent to a Jewish family from a relative from afar stating, "Start worrying. Details to follow." That may be a joke, but unfortunately it represents the fear that some people experience.
	I have learnt about that myself, because although I am not Jewish, I am targeted because I am seen as someone who stands up for the Jewish community. I have had hate mail and death threats. I have been on the receiving end of action by the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, which has campaigned against me in my constituency because of my support for Jewish people. So I sympathise with what Jewish people experience, although I can never directly experience it myself.
	The local police are effective in dealing with the problem. They work closely with the safer neighbourhood teams, which align their patrols in Jewish wards with Shabbat, and with the Community Security Trust. They also have third-party reporting initiatives. In 2006-07, 57 hate crimes were reported in my borough, and 50 were reported last year. So far this year, the number appears to be slightly up. I hope that when hate crimes are recorded nationally from next year, we will have separate recording of anti-Semitic incidents. I suspect that the hate crimes in my constituency were mainly anti-Semitic, but we cannot be sure without the statistics being broken down into greater detail. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will be able to tell us about that when he replies to the debate.
	The Community Security Trust is based in my constituency and I am a member of its advisory board. I was pleased that the Home Secretary accepted my invitation to visit it recently to congratulate it on its performance of its enormous task and to hear more about its work. It supports 1,000 events a year with 1,000 trained, unpaid volunteers and 55 full-time staff. It monitors anti-Semitic groups and organisations, and advises the Government and the police, and more importantly, it provides training courses and is there when it is needed. It also carries out statistical analysis, as we have heard.
	I wish to focus on school security. The Government have said that capital expenditure allocations can be used for security, but I have real doubts about whether that is happening, because the money is not ring-fenced and can be allocated only within the existing devolved budgets. I spoke to the acting education officer in my borough and he told me that no money had been directly allocated for security by Barnet so far. The fact remains that in north London, the CST has recorded many examples of hostile reconnaissance at school sites, including the photographing and filming of schools, note-taking on the perimeters, and examples of trespassing and other attempts to get on to the sites. Schools are sent anti-Semitic literature and subjected to abusive phone calls, stones thrown through windows and anti-Semitic graffiti. At a primary school in my constituency, a suitcase was found chained to a lamppost outside. The building had to be evacuated and a controlled explosion carried out. I visit schools all the time, and the students—from the little kids to sixth formers—tell me time and again about the anti-Semitic incidents that they experience, whether on the 240 bus or on the way to school.
	The money allocated for capital is welcome. The bursar of the Menorah foundation school wrote to me to say:
	"I was delighted to hear that the government has announced that help will be available to Jewish schools".
	However, she made it clear that the real problem was the revenue funding for day-to-day security. Last year, Menorah spent more than £20,000 on the employment of security guards. I phoned Rosh Pinah this morning, and it spent £15,000 on new alarms and a similar sum on security guards. Mathilda Marks Kennedy school reports similar figures. The Independent Jewish day school spends £18,000 a year on guards and Hasmonean junior school spends £19,500. This is a serious problem. We had a debate a while ago about school admissions and schools charging parents to allow their children to attend. It is a voluntary contribution, but Jewish parents are expected to pay towards the cost of ensuring that their children are secure at school. At Menorah, the security element is £300 a year; for Rosh Pinar it is £200, for Mathilda Marks Kennedy £240 and for Hasmonean £105. It is not fair that parents are expected to pay for what every other parent takes for granted—the security and safety of their children when they go to school.
	The secondary school in my constituency, Hasmonean, has to spend £90,000 on security guards every year. The head teacher wrote to me saying:
	"The school has been given clear guidelines that we cannot allow students on site without comprehensive security measures."
	He sets out a list of precautions that, for obvious reasons, I shall not detail. The letter continues:
	"Given that these measures are an absolute requirement in order to be able to ensure the safety of our students it is the view of the school that it is unacceptable that the financial burden is borne by the school. Surely in today's society the students have a right to be educated in safety and it is incumbent on the government to be responsible for ensuring this basic need."
	I very much agree. The capital has been made available in theory, but in practice it has not been filtering through. We need to do far more and ensure that we address the issue of revenue spending, which is the lion's share and takes tens of thousands of pounds out of the schools' budgets, supported by voluntary contributions from the parents. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister can give us some reassurances on that point.
	Reference has been made to the Holocaust Educational Trust. There has been some confusion in the debate, with people praising the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust for work that the HET does and vice versa, but the two do very different jobs. The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust is very important, and indeed, Holocaust memorial day came into existence partly because of the campaign I ran in the House after a visit to Auschwitz with the HET, so there is a link. Both organisations do extremely important work, and I hope that my hon. Friend will recognise that when he replies to the debate.
	The issue of universities has been mentioned. The students and sixth formers in my constituency who go to university have started to select where they should go by how frightened they might be when they get there. Some campuses—I shall not name names—have a reputation for active anti-Semitism that the university authorities do nothing about. Indeed, I have had complaints from students at some universities that they are required to sit their exams on Shabbat because the university will not make special arrangements for them to do otherwise. I take such complaints up with the vice-chancellor or principal concerned and sometimes we can get that changed. It is not fair and it discriminates against students, and is therefore a form of anti-Semitism.
	Finally, I wish to highlight my concerns about the activities of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, which I mentioned earlier. One of its purposes, to persuade young British Muslims to vote, is laudable. However, that message hides a vehemently anti-Semitic organisation with extremist views. It has no offices or fixed premises, and exists as a website. It is not a charitable organisation, listed company or political party, and it should perhaps be registered by the Electoral Commission.
	The MPAC continually vilifies those whom it believes to be supporters of Zionism. In the last general election, it mounted a vitriolic campaign against my right hon. Friend the Lord Chancellor. It also targeted Lorna Fitzsimons and claims credit for de-seating her, having described her in leaflets as
	"a Jewish member of the Labour Friends of Israel".
	She is not Jewish, but it libelled—if that is the right word—her in that way. Personally, I would not take it as a libel to be called Jewish, but MPAC claims it had an effect on her electoral prospects. My hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes) has been described in MPAC literature as a
	"fat, smug and gloating racist...vile racist child killer...filthy blood-soaked criminal".
	That type of language conjures up images of the anti-Semitic myth of the blood libel.
	We have to expose the activities of those people, who are trying to target Members of Parliament for standing up for Jewish constituents. That cannot be right. I have also been on the receiving end of such stuff. MPAC talks about the "Zionist cabal" instead of the "Jewish cabal" to try to pretend that it is not anti-Semitic, but the message is clear. They want people who stand up for Jewish people not to be Members of this House. I hope that we will stand united against their activities and that the Government will take action in that regard.
	I am proud to represent the wonderful and vibrant Jewish community in my constituency, but it has this serious problem. Anti-Semitism has been a light sleeper and it is starting to awaken. We have had attacks on cemeteries and schoolchildren, which generate fear. We have to recognise that something has to be done. The all-party group report is a good start, but a lot more must follow.

Simon Burns: I do not intend to detain the House for long, but I should like to make the point that there is something deeply depressing about the fact that, in the 21st century, there is still unwarranted prejudice and hatred across our society that affects a variety of lifestyles, religions and genders. We have seen some considerable improvements in recent years. However, as many hon. Members who have spoken in the debate have made clear, the depth of anti-Semitism within certain parts of our society is unacceptable and unforgivable.
	I believe that the important way forward is through education. There is now a generation of children for whom the second world war and the atrocities of the Nazi regime are but a very distant footnote in history. Only by bringing to their attention the sheer scale and horror of what went on between 1933 and 1945 can we remind people and educate some people from birth of those horrors and take action to seek to minimise the opportunity for such hatred to continue to be perpetuated. In that respect, I pay tremendous tribute to the Holocaust Educational Trust.
	Like many other hon. Members, I have been fortunate enough to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau with the trust and three of the schools in my constituency—Bosworth school, New Hall and Chelmer Valley—and I have to say as an adult that I found it one of the most harrowing and moving days of my life. For the young people whom I accompanied, it was even more distressing and harrowing because of their age, and it brought home to them the sheer horror of mankind's cruelty to man, woman and child. That is the most effective way to make the case for doing all that we can to remove, reduce and minimise anti-Semitism and the hatred of the Jewish faith and race.
	It is just inconceivable that one group of human beings could treat another in such a disgusting way. So I am pleased about the funding and the efforts that the trust receives from the Government, so that it can continue its vital work. Its work must continue to ensure for our generation of children and the next generation of children that the sheer horror of anti-Semitism at its rawest and most disgraceful is brought home to everyone.

Edward Leigh: That was a good intervention. There is a tradition in our civil service. We never interview Ministers. Our witnesses are only senior civil servants, particularly Permanent Secretaries, and we often make the point that nobody is ever sacked. But things are changing a little. In the case of one or two people whose appearances in front of the Public Accounts Committee were poor—without going into detail; I do not want to become personal about it—their careers have been seriously compromised. The culture is changing and we are making progress.
	I was saying that the Treasury has made some progress in the measurements of savings, and I give credit to it. All this sounds basic, but savings claims are now required to take account of costs incurred, which they did not originally—a fairly obvious point. I also firmly support the proposal for the National Audit Office to review value for money savings Department by Department. I note that the Government intend to look at all major areas of public spending to identify scope to improve value for money. All this is good stuff. A good start would be to examine the back catalogue of the Committee. We spend years looking into such matters, and we have a real contribution to make.
	Spending taxpayers' money is what Government do, but we know that spending money is the easiest thing in the world: getting something for it is harder. Government spending on the NHS has nearly trebled over the past 10 years—we want to give them credit for that—and is set to grow still further. Where there has been such an increase in Government spending, it is important to look carefully at productivity.
	It is not for me to question the level of spending, but I am entitled to voice my suspicion, based on several of our reports, that we are not getting enough bangs for that barrage of bucks. It is lazy thinking to increase spending rapidly on a service, point to more doctors, nurses and operations—I agree that there are more doctors, nurses and operations—and not to insist at the same time on maintaining improvements in productivity and efficiency, so that we pay back to the taxpayer who has contributed so much more to the service real, identifiable improvements in productivity on the front line.
	Let us take one example—the pay deal for NHS consultants. The aims of the consultants' deal were commendable, but so far generous pay settlements have been awarded without any increases in productivity being achieved. Consultants' pay has, on average, increased by 27 per cent., working hours have actually decreased and, as yet, measurable improvements in productivity have been notable by their absence. With GP contracts, on which we will report shortly, we found a similar picture. Pay increases of up to 56 per cent. have been accompanied by a 2.5 per cent. decrease in productivity, plus £1.7 billion worth of extra costs. We all agree that those who work in the NHS deserve to be paid a decent wage, but those one-sided deals have produced little in return for an enormous amount of investment by the taxpayer.
	Is there enough focus on making economies? In our second report on prescription drugs, we found that the NHS could save more than £200 million a year, without affecting patient care, by GPs prescribing lower cost but equally effective medicines. A further £100 million a year could be saved by reducing the amount of unused and wasted drugs. To give the NHS due credit, these are paths that it has already begun to tread, but there is still a long walk ahead.
	It is not just in the NHS that money could be saved. Our examination of sustainable employment showed that some £520 million a year could be saved if the Department could only break the debilitating cycle of insecurity faced by too many unskilled jobseekers bouncing back and forth between short-term jobs and welfare.
	I regret to say that our most recent look at the sorry saga of tax credits shows little sign of improvement for recipients or for taxpayers. The amount of tax credit being lost to fraud and error is still running at some £1 billion each year. The Department has accepted our recommendations on the need to set targets to reduce this, yet still no targets are in place. The system has also generated massive overpayment to claimants, £6 billion in three years, and £2.3 billion has been written off or is unlikely to be returned.
	I make no criticism of the concept of tax credits, and it may indeed be the right thing to do, but we are entitled to look at how efficiently the scheme is being carried out. About 2 million families a year have been placed in debt to the Government as HMRC seeks to recover overpayments. The vulnerable ones face a future of trying to repay the money they owe, with all the hardship that that involves. The taxpayer, in all guises, has been let down.
	The Government's response on tax credits is the one glaring omission from the Treasury minutes before us. I understand that the response will appear in June, which is more than four months since our report appeared. I am sure that the Minister, twice a member of our Committee, will recognise that that is not good enough, and I ask her to see that the delay grows no longer. If the Treasury cannot provide its own responses on time, it is hardly setting an example for the rest of Whitehall to follow. I trust that the eight-week deadline will be adhered to from now on. I thought we had an agreement with the Treasury that in order to make our reports and its response reasonably topical, there would be an eight-week deadline for the Government to reply.
	Let us turn aside from that sorry tale. I am proud to be able to say that our previous recommendations are now bearing fruit. In 2007, we identified potential annual savings of £500 million from better use across the public sector of external consultants. The Office of Government Commerce has launched a new programme to improve the value for money of spending on consultants. Several Committee and NAO reports on HMRC issues such as fraud, self-assessment and debt management led to savings last year of £200 million. Already, our report on prescription drugs is having an impact. I welcome the recent announcement by the Department of Health, in response to our recommendation, that it will commission research into the scale of medicines wastage and why people do not take their medicines.
	Our criticism is intended to be constructive. Government action is always necessary to deliver our recommendations. We rely completely on the Government. In that respect, as in others, our Committee is truly non-partisan. Change could be accelerated and spread more swiftly across Government, but what we have already achieved is testament to the positive value of public accountability. Money is saved and services are improved by our activities, and by our working in tandem with the Treasury, which we view not as our enemies but as our allies.
	We have the advantage of hindsight, of course, but hindsight also brings the foresight to do things better in the future. To paraphrase Confucius, a man who has committed a mistake and does not correct it is committing another mistake. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger in "The Terminator", Departments should know that we will be back, and not just on tax credits. We have looked on a number of occasions at the dome and at the 2012 Olympics. We are about to revisit the perplexing project that is the NHS programme for IT. That is the strength of the Committee. When the Government, through the Treasury, accept our recommendations, we increasingly ask, as the Committee for the National Audit Office, to look at that acceptance and see what has happened 12 and 24 months later.
	Furthermore, we are trying to get involved and have a genuine look at fashionable projects such as the academy programme. We have issued hard-hitting reports based not on ideology or whether we like academies—I know that the issue is controversial—but on what is happening on the ground. For instance, we found that literacy and numeracy levels are still too low among academy pupils and that the Department should ask successful academies to identify and disseminate good practice. We looked at cost overruns, which have been common because cost control is not robust enough and found that the Department should disseminate the lessons learned about project management and so on.
	We operate from the sound base provided by the staff and skills of the National Audit Office. Everybody knows that the Committee could not do its work alone and that it works so well because 400 civil servants work for it. We do not claim much of the credit; we are simply the voice of the National Audit Office, although it also relies on us to give our own parliamentary experience of what goes on.
	In that context, I must express our gratitude to Sir John Bourn, who retired as Comptroller and Auditor General in January after nearly 20 years of unstinting support for the Committee. Every member of the Committee shares that view. I also thank Sir John's successor, Tim Burr, under whose stewardship the NAO's independence and authority continue to be secure.
	I am also a member of the Public Accounts Commission, the body that oversees the National Audit Office. We have welcomed John Tyner's review of the NAO's corporate governance arrangements and have set out our own proposals for strengthening them. We agree with John Tyner and I think that the Government agree with us; there is no controversy about that. I thank the Government for promising to incorporate the necessary legislative changes into the draft Constitutional Renewal Bill.
	However, Mr. Burr's appointment is an interim arrangement; a permanent successor still needs to be found. Progress is not being made at the pace that I would want. I urge the Government to make a bit more haste; surely it is not good to have an acting Comptroller and Auditor General. The process of appointing a new CAG should not be unduly delayed.
	In conclusion, I should say that we are not only one of the busiest Committees of the House; I also like to think that we are one of the most effective. I pay tribute to the Committee's members, who continue to work hard to hold the Government to account. I thank the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke), who has left the Committee. I welcome the galaxy of stars who have joined: the right hon. Member for Streatham (Keith Hill) and the hon. Members for Sutton and Cheam (Mr. Burstow), for Edinburgh, South (Nigel Griffiths), for Sedgefield (Phil Wilson) and for Morecambe and Lunesdale (Geraldine Smith). As ever, we thank our Clerk, Mark Etherton, and his team for their support and help.
	Finally, I should say that the Public Accounts Committee helps to give a voice to Parliament—and, through us, to the citizen—on the delivery of public services. When services fail those in greatest need, we provide a voice for the vulnerable. When inefficient spending fails those who contribute most in taxes, we provide a voice for the taxpayer. Furthermore, we serve the citizen in all guises by putting our bark and our bite into the pursuit of real change. I commend the motion to the House.

Austin Mitchell: I was very keen to participate in this debate, particularly as our friend the Chairman of the Committee, the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), was so heavy in persuading us to take part. The debate is a useful and interesting opportunity to get some sort of summation of the work we have done during the year. Reports come to us so quickly that it is often difficult to fit them into a framework or to keep pace with them. The schedule of reports up for debate today makes fascinating reading.
	We have had a very successful year with some big subjects and some small, but all of them gave an insight into Government procedures that is not available to any other Committee. This has certainly been the most fascinating Select Committee that I have ever been on. If I may transfer my useful sycophancy from the leader of our party to the Chairman of the Committee, I must say that the Committee has been extremely well led. I very much admire the staccato series of bullets that he fires at officials, which gives us headings under which we do our own rifle work later in the debate. That gives an important lead to the Committee, and he has been an effective Chairman. He is effective in giving a lot of diverse characters—we are a high-powered Committee, and the Committee members here today, including former members, are particularly high powered—our heads and allowing us to do our own thing. I deprecate the kind of wry expression that he sometimes assumes as I launch into another insane attack on some institution—he should keep his feelings to himself—but he has the important skill of leadership.
	The interesting thing about the Committee is that it is the one I have served on that is most relevant to the needs and interests of ordinary people. After all, it is their money that we are talking about. We produce reports on things that affect their lives, such as the cost of medicine, which hits home to many people, or the state of accommodation for servicemen, and who is responsible for the myriad failures in that area. As part of our inquiries, we have looked at whether people's doctors provide a good service, and we have helped in that area. We have considered the cost and state of our roads as we examined the Highways Agency and the effectiveness of the vehicle licensing agency in Wales.
	Highlighting the failures to report and deal accurately with evasion by motorcyclists was quite an achievement. I did not realise that it is impossible to photograph on an electronic device the registration plates of motorcyclists. Having seen how easily motorcyclists can evade the speed cameras, I am considering the purchase of a high-powered motorbike for my wife, who is accumulating points in a dangerous fashion. A motorbike might be the only way out.
	We had an insight into the sort of problems that ordinary people face and we have had a direct impact. People pay taxes and tax will become an increasingly important issue as the election approaches and it becomes a battleground for the parties, and more so, as the economy moves into recession. It will then be essential to see that money is well spent. Tax will become a more important issue, and we are the main agency for seeing that taxes are well and effectively spent, and that people get value for money.
	The infuriating thing is that our work is, to an extent, post-mortem work. The people we get to grill are usually not the perpetrators—they are not, as the US Securities and Exchange Commission would say, in its examinations of financial fraud in the United States, the people responsible for the decisions and the deficiencies being examined, but their successors. The people who made the mistakes have usually moved on and been rewarded with some kind of honour, as my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay) has pointed out. We deal with the accounting officers and it is appropriate that we should do so. However, it would be nice occasionally to be able to call the perpetrators of the failures and problems that we deal with.
	We did just that in the case of the Rural Payments Agency and the failure of the European payments, when we examined, after some delay and with some difficulty, the role of the agency's chief executive. We were able to show, essentially, that the failure was not only his, but a failure all round. It was a failure by the civil service—by departmental officials, and those right at the top, too—to stand up to Ministers when asked to do the impossible and say, "This can't be done, especially not with the staff resources that we have available." It is the responsibility of the civil service not only to be a "can do" service, but to be a "can't do" service when it sees that its work is impossible and when it sees the damage that will be done to the Department and itself. The civil service must have more confidence and speak out.
	We should call the perpetrators. As my hon. Friend has said, all too often they are rewarded with an honour, just as people in business who fail are rewarded with high monetary compensation—the case of Adam Applegarth at Northern Rock comes to mind. Unfortunately, the civil service has its equivalents. There should be penalties for failure and they should be made clear.
	I fear that we are occasionally bamboozled. I instance a recent inquiry into Postcomm, which seems to be dedicated to ruining the Royal Mail as a service. The other regulators seem to be concerned to give special concessions and advantages to those with power and money, who can get better prices, the costs of which are then imposed on the vulnerable, who pay more for the services that they receive. Postcomm says that it is protecting a universal service, but that service is deteriorating. We do not get Sunday deliveries now and Saturday deliveries are under threat, and there is only one delivery a day, when there used to be two.
	However, after Postcomm had appeared before us and defended its procedures, it made an announcement saying not only that it continued to be dedicated to promoting competition and liberalisation, because they were providing a
	"far better customer focus and strong incentives for all mail operators"
	to serve larger companies, but that it wanted a part-privatisation, which was not mentioned at our hearing. Quite out of the blue, Postcomm admitted a major financial problem, with the pension funds in particular, which it had denied at the hearing. Having admitted that it had reduced the profitability of the Royal Mail, Postcomm went on to advocate making Royal Mail's activities subject to the same rate of VAT as the private operators.
	None of that was mentioned at our hearing, but it all appeared subsequently. We should have known that that would happen, because it is unreasonable to take one position at a hearing and then announce something totally different the next day. That makes me think.
	The Chairman justifiably paid credit to Sir John Bourn and to the devoted work of his staff, which I heartily second, but is there not a case for the Committee having a small research staff of its own for the immediate preparation of briefings for Committee members before meetings? It is impossible for us to keep up with commercial developments, consultants, companies' successes and failures and what is happening across Departments.
	My hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon)—I shall call him my hon. Friend for Committee purposes—assiduously keeps up with such matters and must have an enormous machine behind him. I hope that all those people have not been transferred to work for Boris in the cucumber. My hon. Friend's sources of information are myriad and enthusiastic. He sits there with a pile of information that I do not have, and I try to peer at his notes so that I can ask some telling questions. The rest of us do not have that capability or support—or, indeed, the passionate enthusiasm that he shows. It would benefit our procedures to have a research staff to bring us up to date on the clippings, at least, and on the latest developments, between the publication of the National Audit Office's report and our examination of it.
	I should like briefly to follow the Chairman's example—this is another example of my growing sycophantic tendencies—by following certain themes. One thing that emerges from the reports is the constant tendency to overreach, or to try to do too much. That is a political problem that comes from Ministers, who are subject to the temptation of promising certain things. They use tripartite phrases, saying that something will not only satisfy world peace and build up British defence, but will do good for Mrs. Bloggs of 13 Columbus way, Grimsby. We try to do too much, and in many cases Ministers try to impose too much on Departments that are not capable of carrying the load.
	The RPA has been a disaster. There are now cuts in the British Waterways budget and proposals to sell lock-keepers' houses as a consequence of the failure of the payments scheme. That disaster and the fines from Europe for being naughty stem from the tendency to overreach. Ministers committed themselves to the most complex payment system available on the ground that it was the best way of proceeding. It was a much more complex system than anyone else used, and the results were disastrous.
	The agency simply was not capable of responding, particularly because it was faced with efficiency requirements that led to the redundancies of large numbers of staff. Its was firing staff and then was suddenly faced with the need to introduce and implement the most complex system of rural payments of any nation in the European Union. That was barmy, and the agency could not cope. Interestingly, civil servants and the agency tried to cope, and did not effectively warn Ministers that things were not going to happen. Ministers continued to get reports that programmes were rolling ahead and that everything was okay until a week before the payments were due, when they were suddenly faced with disaster. That was partly due to the civil servants being too diffident, but it was largely due to Ministers taking on a commitment and overreaching in the way that I have described. A ministerial head rolled: Lord Bach lost his job, although he was personally told by Tony Blair that that was not because of the disaster with rural payments, which makes me absolutely certain that it was.
	That is just one example. We see the same kind of overstretch, and a tendency to try to do too much, in defence. Our major projects report showed that the budgets were being maintained largely because commitments were being shuffled on to other budgets, and therefore effectively concealed. This has led me to believe that we have too many major projects, and that they are too expensive and too technical for the system to bear. Added to all that is the commitment to update our nuclear deterrent, which is a very expensive project that has been heaped on top of other projects. All these projects are overstretching the Department's resources, and the ability of the taxpayer to finance them. This is incredible.
	We do not need the nuclear deterrent. The world has changed, and we are no longer in a cold war. We can never use our nuclear deterrent. Who would we use it on? Would we ever use it without the authorisation of the Americans? It is extremely expensive, yet, because of the system of political overreach, we are now placing an obligation on the Ministry of Defence at a time when it is already stretched because we are fighting two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and putting in more effort than any of our NATO allies except the United States. There is already equipment strain, and problems with coping with those who have been wounded and damaged in the war. This is another example of overstretch that emerged in our report. It is a warning to us as politicians, and certainly to Ministers, to think through the commitments before they are made.
	Another example involves efficiency savings. They are now part of the magic of government. There is a pretence that we can go on making efficiency savings of 2, 3, 4 or 5 per cent. every year, but this amounts to a process of continuous anorexia. My own figure does not testify to this, but I understand that anorexia is eventually fatal, which is why I have managed to avoid it through my own personal eating habits. When it comes to efficiency savings in Government Departments, it is also a myth.
	Our report on this subject states:
	"The Government's Efficiency Programme is designed to achieve ongoing efficiency gains across the public sector of £21.5 billion".
	Whenever politicians are told that the tax burden is too heavy, they always say, "We're going to make efficiency savings, and we'll cut out waste." But that never happens. Only two thirds of the £21.5 billion target was expected to release resources for other projects. The efficiency savings involved were often mythical. Our report also rightly pointed out:
	"There is evidence that some efficiency projects may be having an adverse impact on service quality."
	It gives an example in the Department of Health, where there has clearly been an impact on service quality. The report goes on to state:
	"Improvements in efficiency might not be sustainable."
	For example, the Ministry of Defence's early decommissioning of some of its fast jets gave a one-off financial saving but reduced the capability of the Royal Air Force to deal with certain situations. So I believe that there is a good deal of myth involved in these efficiency savings. A large proportion of them are phoney.
	Jobcentre Plus made efficiency savings, but as I pointed out in Committee, they are often made by shifting costs on to the clients, who now have to be dealt with by telephone. If they do not have a telephone, too bad; they then have to sponge on the citizens advice bureau or my office in Grimsby or a centre for the homeless and use their telephones to get through to fix up an appointment. It has to be done and dealt with by telephone and personal bonding between the Department and the recipient is damaged. That is one example and, as I have pointed out at some length, the Rural Payment Agency provides another.
	Another example of overreach applies to consultants. There have been fewer examples this year of overpayments and excessive use of consultants, but whenever a problem arises, there is still a tendency to say "Bring in the consultants". The assumption is that the civil service cannot deal with the problem, but that consultants have access to some form of higher wisdom; they are the way, the truth and the light, as far as the Government are concerned, so they bring them in at inordinate expense.
	What we need is an audit of the efficiency of consultants. Some are bad, some are good, some are brilliant and some are bums. I think the hon. Member for Gainsborough mentioned the role of the Office of Government Commerce. It is not providing effective advice on who to use and it is not auditing performance on a continuous basis so that it can make serious recommendations. It acts as a sort of agency for the employment of consultants rather than providing a critique of their employment.
	There are certainly problems with the competence of Departments in some areas. I would cite the issue of Icelandic compensation in the fisheries industry as an example. The Department of Trade and Industry, as it was, did not have enough expertise or knowledge of the industry to provide a foolproof system. Some of the mistakes it made were laughable, and I engaged in a long correspondence over this matter. The DTI seemed to think that the Icelandic limits were 200 terrestrial miles rather than 200 nautical miles, which is much more. Indeed, the area extending to 200 nautical miles included large chunks of Faroese waters, so many people should have had compensation accordingly. Because the Department did not understand, it took ages to convince it that this was the case. It did not know the practice of the industry, decreeing that a 12-week break in service precluded people from compensation.
	In Grimsby, when the fisherman who used to fish in Icelandic waters could no longer do so, he was forced to fish in the North sea. That was deemed as being a break in service, although it was part of the structure of the industry and a Government necessity. A ludicrous situation developed: some fishermen got compensation because although they had had a 12-week break, they had served it in prison and had not been paid; while others who had spent that time on the North sea and consequently had been paid were not entitled to the compensation.
	Clearly, some Departments make mistakes by not listening enough to the voice of the industry, while other Departments listen too much. I was very worried by the tendency of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs to schmooze with the big taxpayers in its dealings with big companies. I find it difficult to believe that these companies, some of which are chiselling crooks like the rest of us, comprise honest and honourable people who always rush to pay their taxes. That attitude—of rushing enthusiastically to pay taxes—is associated with no company that I have ever known on the market, yet that is what HMRC appears to believe. I was a bit concerned about that, and also by the small number of staff employed to deal with big-company tax evasion and avoidance in comparison with the number employed to deal with social security fraud, who bring home much smaller sums than are available to those dealing with companies properly.
	I do not want to go on for much longer, as I have already exceeded my welcome. I sense that from the growing indifference to my jokes as the debate proceeds. However, I want to issue a few more congratulations. We have produced some excellent reports. We have speeded up the dilatory progress of the Thames Gateway scheme, which was plodding along far too slowly.

Andrew MacKinlay: I think that I can claim to be the only hon. Member qualified unreservedly to congratulate the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee and his colleagues on their work, their diligence in their studies, the breadth of their work, and the speed with which they have made some very important, cogent reports. I say that because I think that I am the only Back Bencher present who is not a member of the Committee. Clearly, the Government and Opposition Front Benchers can and will congratulate the Committee on its work, but their role and functions are different. The Opposition Front Bencher, the hon. Member for Putney (Justine Greening), is charged with prosecuting the case, as it were, against the Government's stewardship of many projects. The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury will defend arrangements and explain why no blame can be apportioned to the Government.
	I feel privileged to be able to say that I have come to the Chamber this afternoon because I believe that the job that the Committee does of monitoring Government expenditure and performance is profoundly important. Its work goes to the heart of the constitution and the role of Parliament. A distinguished and very senior Whip looked into the Chamber earlier, and when he saw me sitting here, he raised his eyebrows to heaven. I try to interpret body language; he thought that I was either barking mad to be here when there will be no vote, or malevolent. Far too often, members of the Government confuse Government Back Benchers' scrutiny with malevolence and criticism. If a Government Back Bencher scrutinises a measure, the Government see them as mad or bad, or perhaps mad and bad, which is even more worrying.

Andrew MacKinlay: I do not want to delay the House on this subject, but I think that it does go to the heart of the issue of scrutiny, which is what the volumes that we are considering are about. Without disclosing any private or personal information relating to my political party, I can say that I owe a debt to the Minister, because I know that she had a hand in ensuring that I stayed on the Foreign Affairs Committee when others wanted to take me off it, for reasons that I have mentioned.

Andrew MacKinlay: Anyway, having got that off my chest, let me say that the reports that we are considering are extremely worth while. I want to refer to a few of them, some of which relate to my constituency.
	First, I shall deal with the report on the Assets Recovery Agency. The appalling failure to recover substantial assets from criminals to offset the agency's costs is a big disappointment. Clearly, the legislation was somewhat flawed, and the stewardship of the agency left an awful lot to be desired. I am not sure that merging it with the Serious Organised Crime Agency will prove to be sensible. Parliament should have done better. It should have worked harder and revisited the matter with new legislation, and the Government should have seen that the administration and management of the agency improved. It is a matter of powers and of stewardship, and the agency could have been much more successful.
	I take an interest in Northern Ireland. Abandoning the Assets Recovery Agency, merging it with the Serious Organised Crime Agency, doing away with the Assets Recovery Agency in Northern Ireland and merging it in the blancmange of the new agency will prove to be a big mistake. Even if the Government had decided to merge the two agencies, they should have introduced a new statute that hived off the function in Northern Ireland. A designated Northern Ireland agency could have complemented and worked much more closely with the very successful assets recovery agency in the Irish Republic, which to some extent pioneered our legislation. It was a mistake not to ring-fence the function in Northern Ireland. There is an ongoing need to tackle organised crime and to recover the profits of crime in that part of the United Kingdom.
	I commend the Committee for its work on reducing the reliance on landfill in England. I feel particularly strongly about that because my constituency, Thurrock, has been scarred by more than 100 years of landfill. It is unjust, unfair, appalling in its effect on the environment, and it is still going on. Successive Governments have not been energetic enough or enthusiastic enough in reducing the amount of waste put in landfill. Parliament has not taken seriously its moral obligations to reduce the amount of packaging and waste that is produced.
	We feel strongly about the matter in Thurrock because landfill has altered the topography of Thurrock and continues to do so, with unnatural bunds in and around the Thames estuary. It is highly inappropriate. The Government should take on board urgently the recommendations of the Public Accounts Committee and other organisations. Many local authorities are not doing nearly enough to encourage recycling and the sorting of waste. I notice that the Committee drew attention to the fact that the food and restaurant sector is finding cheaper ways of disposing of the waste that they generate, but it still ends up in landfill and it still ends up in my constituency.
	I unashamedly say to the House that that is unacceptable. I see it every day. The little bit of river traffic that passes this building, the tugs pulling the long craft, is heading for Thurrock. It is London's waste going to Thurrock. Each day there is an increment in pollution in my part of Essex. It is unacceptable, it is distorting the topography, and I make no apology for commending the report to the House and asking the Government to take the issue much more seriously and tackle it as a matter of urgency.
	The Committee has done some important work on the Environment Agency, which is charged by Parliament with maintaining river and coastal defences in England. It troubles me that again we are fiddling while Rome burns. If one reads the report, one sees that very little has been done—that is not fair. I withdraw that. I should say that the energy and enthusiasm of the Environment Agency, and the stewardship that Parliament charges the agency with, have been seen to be deficient. It has to deal with things immediately, but it also has to have a long-term view. Clearly, the agency is not beginning to address the causes of what could be cataclysmic consequences—probably within your and my lifetimes, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and certainly within those of our children and grandchildren—if the problem in and around our coast is not seriously addressed.
	As I said, I represent part of the Thames estuary, but not part that is covered by the Thames barrier. It is, however, part of the estuary that is the subject of another report—the Thames Gateway development, which clearly has ramifications for and raises issues about flooding. I do not think that there is joined-up government on the issue. I have some sympathy for the Environment Agency, in that it appears that it does not have the resources or responsibilities that it should. Furthermore, Ministers are transient and there are always reorganisations of Government Departments, which seem to merge and disappear and get new titles and so on. There does not seem to be a coherent, long-term strategy on how and to what extent we should defend the Thames estuary in particular.
	Speaking personally, I am amazed that nothing is under way to put an additional barrier across the Thames in the wider estuary. Such a project could be self-financing and include a road and/or rail crossing, which is much needed for the United Kingdom economy. That is the kind of ambitious engineering that should be advanced. It cannot be advanced entirely by the Environment Agency, which does not have the resources for a major engineering construction; it should be advanced by Her Majesty's Government. If we ignore that need, there will almost inevitably be dreadful consequences. They might not come next week or in the next decade—but in the next century they will. People will look back at this Parliament and recent Parliaments, which have not really done anything to address the problem. I hope that the Public Accounts Committee report's criticism of some of the Environment Agency's stewardship will be taken on board, and I implore the Government to take on more.
	I have referred to the Government's Thames Gateway strategy, on which the Public Accounts Committee produced an important and powerful report. I was much encouraged that, for the first time, some colleagues were addressing the flaws and failings of a Government initiative and strategy that was well meant but was not being achieved. I intervened from a sedentary position on my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell) when he referred to that report, the contents of which he is justifiably proud. He demonstrated some dismay when I intervened rather rudely and said that it is still the case that nothing is changing. Perhaps that was an exaggeration, but I want to share with the House something that illustrates that despite the Committee's forensic, detailed report on the failings and problems arising from the Thames Gateway project, the Government are still in denial this afternoon.
	I buttress my case by saying that this very week, the Government office for the east of England produced the regional spatial strategy for the eastern region—that is parlance for a regional development plan. Almost two years ago, before the Public Accounts Committee hearings, I implored the Government, in both speech and writing, to address the fact that the bureaucrats in that Government office had decided, for some reason, that Thurrock Lakeside retail park was not or should not be designated a regional shopping centre. I do not know whether anyone knows my bailiwick, but that shopping centre is demonstrably a regional shopping centre. That decision is like suggesting that these green Benches are red. It is a barmy, crackpot view expressed by bureaucrats. Not only is it mad, but it has some consequences.
	The fact that Lakeside is not designated as a regional shopping centre has an impact on the Thurrock urban development corporation, which is a creature of statute and a baby of this Labour Government. It frustrates the corporation in fulfilling its job of creating new training opportunities and ensuring that the right skills are in the right place in Thurrock and along the Thames Gateway. It needs to be able to develop the land around the Lakeside basin—I call it the Lakeside shopping centre, but basin is the technical term for the area—and for it to do that Lakeside has to be designated a regional shopping centre.
	I have complained about that fact in this Chamber a number of times. I think that it hurt the Government when I said that the process was the opposite of joined-up government. People moved nervously and, of course, the Ministers were transient, because one of the great problems with the whole strategy is the turnover of Ministers charged with it. It is the opposite of joined-up government because in the Department that deals with the matter, one Minister is in charge of spatial strategy while another, to the best of his or her ability, enthusiastically tries to push the Thames Gateway strategy forward.
	I have drawn attention to that problem time and again. This week, the spatial strategy came out. I agreed with a lot of it, but it had one caveat—that the Lakeside basin at Thurrock would be the subject of further consultation. The East of England regional assembly and the Government office will report in December 2009 about the category that should cover Lakeside. Ministers should not take my word for it. They should go back to their Departments and ask, "Is what the hon. Member for Thurrock said true?" They will then see that the process is the opposite of joined-up government.

Andrew MacKinlay: The hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) raised a legitimate point. One of the things acknowledged by the PAC—thank goodness—was that the Thames Gateway is covered by no fewer than three Government regions. There is the Greater London region and the eastern region, which we are in, although what goes on in Norwich has no relevance to my people—I am sure we love Norwich and Cambridgeshire, but we are not oriented towards that area. The hon. Gentleman referred to our colleague from Kent and of course his constituency is in the south-east region. That illustrates just how many confusing agencies there are. Moreover, the motorway system bears no relation to the scheme; the motorways of the Greater London region go from my region and from Kent into London.
	I implore the Government not to take the view they put in their response—that everything in the garden is rosy. It is not. Sooner or later the Prime Minister will wake up to the fact that the developments he attaches such great importance to—creating new homes and quality communities with essential public services commensurate with residential growth and an increasing skills base—will not be achieved unless there is a root and branch review of the policy for the Thames Gateway, and particularly but not exclusively for Thurrock urban development corporation. The Government should use as their starting point the PAC report, which I commend to the House.

Philip Dunne: It is an enormous pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay). As a former retailer, I assure the House that the hon. Gentleman is not mad. Thurrock is one of the UK's top 20 retail centres and for it not to be regarded as such by bureaucrats shows how out of touch they are with the reality of the commercial world.
	I have served on the Committee with pleasure for the past 18 months and most of my remarks will address how relevant our work is to the world of Government today, rather than focusing on one of the problems identified at our previous opportunity to debate the work of the Committee, which was how often we look back with excessive hindsight at administrative failings. Too much distance makes things less relevant both to our constituents and when making improvements for the future. In some cases, as I will explain, we are highly topical and relevant.
	It is essential for the accountability of the Executive that we have a body such as the Public Accounts Committee to provide accountability to the legislature, and that is the role that we fulfil. Without wanting to pat myself and my colleagues on the back too much for being one of the more diligent Committees in the House in the work that we—supported by the National Audit Office—undertake, that diligence is shown by the number of reports that we have before us for consideration.
	The vast majority of our reports tend to be connected with events that occurred at some point in the past, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) illustrated in relation to the single farm payments case, some of which took place a number of years ago. During the period under review, we also reviewed the Icelandic trawlermen's compensation arrangements, which meant going back not just years but decades to arrangements that were put in place in the 1970s.
	Having said that, some of the reports were still topical while we were dealing with them—for example, the 55th report of the 2006-07 Session, "The Delays in Administering the 2005 Single Payment Scheme in England", which was published in September 2007. We reviewed the report with the NAO after we had eventually managed to persuade the former chief executive, Mr. McNeill, to come before the Committee. We had a session in June 2007 at which point there were beneficiaries of the payment scheme who had still not been paid the moneys from 2005 to which they were entitled. Although that applied to a relatively small number of people, and in most cases related to farms that had gone into probate, it was still causing considerable anguish among the people who were entitled to the payments.
	We encouraged the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to bring forward payments for the subsequent years of 2006 and 2007, and now of course 2008, in order to learn the lessons of the failures of the past and to try to ensure that payments were made in a much more timely fashion. I called on DEFRA's permanent secretary to give an undertaking that payments for 2008 should be made within that calendar year. DEFRA will have had more than three years to put this fiasco right, and we are talking about a relatively small number of claimants—118,000 at the time of the report; I think that the number goes down slightly each year instead of going up. In terms of the scale of administration of support schemes, this one is relatively small, and most of the challenges of putting it in place should have been ironed out by now. We will await with interest how it gets on in relation to 2007 and the current year.
	My second example of a report that had considerable topicality when we were working on it is the fourth report of the 2007-08 Session—"Environment Agency: Building and maintaining river and coastal flood defences in England". We met to consider the NAO report in the week after the first of the dramatic floods had occurred last June. We therefore had the opportunity to quiz the chief executive of the Environment Agency about what it had been doing in the interval between that hearing and the previous occasion five years earlier when she appeared before the predecessor Committee. It was most revealing to establish that although the agency had then committed to produce a flood management action plan for each of the 67 separate river catchments, by April 2007 only four of those had been completed, one of which happened to cover the area that I represent.
	Ludlow is within the catchment of the upper Severn river basin, where we had suffered very significant flood damage, if not as bad as some of the damage in the areas around Hull. More than 300 houses were flooded and a bridge on one of the main arterial routes into the town of Ludlow was swept away. That bridge was not even identified as being at risk under any of the categories in the flood management defence plan, which the Environment Agency proudly claimed that they had completed for our area. That throws into question the value of such plans if they do not even pick up significant infrastructure elements such as a road bridge. Our Committee was able to highlight, almost contemporaneously, some important aspects of Departments' administration. That shows its significance.
	We are not only occasionally topical or contemporaneous but increasingly forward looking. I shall cite two examples of that. We have begun a scrutiny role for the spending on one of the largest public infrastructure projects that the country is undertaking—the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics. I am vice-chairman of the all-party London 2012 group, the chairman of which is a former member of the PAC, the hon. Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Derek Wyatt), who was mentioned earlier. He held a conference today to update Members of Parliament and other interested parties on progress.
	I support the games, but our Committee has the opportunity to scrutinise the spending to an extent that is not otherwise available to the public. We intend to do so on a basis that, we hope, will allow the games to be delivered on time and on the new, revised and much increased budget, as opposed to looking back in several years to ascertain whether they were delivered on time and on budget. That would not be much use to anyone because we I cannot imagine that we will host another Olympic games in my lifetime. The Committee therefore fulfils a valuable role and we are looking forward to seeing progress every year. It was apparent from our first session, which was held last November, that the information provided to the Olympic Board was perhaps not as full as it might have been. When we next consider the matter, it will be intriguing to learn how much more financial information has been made available.
	The financial information that the Olympic Delivery Authority reported to its accountable body—the Olympic Board—could be included on less than two sides of a sheet of A4. For a project of more than £9 billion, that seems a little light. I hope that the most recently appointed member to the board, following the local elections, can bring his forensic eye for detail to its deliberations and that Mayor Boris Johnson will insist on much more vigorous financial information and scrutiny of spending, as, indeed, we will.
	The second more or less contemporary role that the Committee has undertaken in the past six months is that of shedding some light on the single largest potential security breach, which did so much to undermine confidence in the Administration's competence—the loss of data held by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. Given that the loss occurred during transmission of data from Revenue and Customs to the NAO, our Committee was quite properly briefed by the Comptroller and Auditor General in a session last December. As a result of that session and our ability to question one side of the transfer, by asking the Comptroller and Auditor General I secured the exchange of e-mails between Revenue and Customs and the NAO, which explained what information was being sought, the manner in which delivery was requested and the individual titles of those in Revenue and Customs who had been copied into the correspondence. Without that, we would have been left with only the Chancellor's statement, which shed little light at all on the detail of what transpired.
	I believe that it was a result of that session—in addition to the work of many hon. Members, particularly those on my Front Bench—that the Government were persuaded to appoint Mr. Kieran Poynter of PricewaterhouseCoopers to undertake a detailed review of what had happened. We have had the first part of that report, but we are eagerly awaiting the second stage to see whether it provides any further illumination on what happened, and whether Government procedures for information, transmission and management of personal information will be improved. Let us hope that the lesson learned from this sorry affair means that better procedures are put in place, which Ministers assure us will be the case.
	I do not intend to go through the work that we have done on other reports because they have been adequately covered by other Committee members, but I would like to conclude by saying that the Committee is a pleasure to work on. It has been a great privilege to have the opportunity to work with Sir John Bourn during the final year or so of his tenure, and I would like to join other hon. Members in wishing him well in his retirement.

Angela Eagle: My hon. Friend will have to think of something more useful to buy his wife for Christmas.
	The hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) asked a series of, as always, relevant questions. He spoke of ending the ban on what can be debated under the motion so that our debates could become more contemporary. The Government do not have a particular view on that; it is a matter for the House. If the House decides that it wants to change the way in which we debate PAC reports, I shall do my best—or whoever succeeds me in my post will do their best—to respond in a timely fashion.
	The hon. Gentleman asked about the following up of Treasury guidance. Such guidance takes a number of forms. A recent example is the "Dear auditor" letter which was sent to all Departments after I had been in correspondence with the hon. Member for Gainsborough about the follow-up to a PAC report in a certain non-departmental public body. It instructed Departments to follow up and publish in their annual reports what they are doing about the recommendations agreed in PAC reports. The NAO often alerts the Treasury to emerging problems in particular areas, and there is a great deal of constructive discussion and debate between them. We do not like anything to slip through our fingers, and we are trying to establish programmes that will ensure that no recommendations issued either to Departments or to other bodies slip through the net in future. Every Department has a team in the Treasury that has its ear to the ground and tries to keep an eye on things. It is obviously regrettable if something slips through the net, but we try to minimise that.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay) made an extremely good contribution on landfill, and on the prospect of a new Thames barrier to mitigate flooding risks. He also spoke about the Thames Gateway in principle, as well as about his local shopping centre. He clearly has views on the way in which the gateway has been set up, but I cannot stray into them because they are not in my ministerial area. I will say, however, that major progress has been made in the development of the Thames Gateway. More than 42,000 new homes were built in the Gateway between 2001 and 2007. The number of jobs created in the Gateway has grown by 10 per cent. between 2001 and 2006, compared with an average 4 per cent. increase in England as a whole. The Government have never believed that a top-down centralised structure is right for the Gateway, which is an area 40 miles in length with a population of 1.5 million and dozens of different towns and communities. However, my hon. Friend has robust views on the matter and I am sure he will continue to express them to the appropriate Ministers. I undertake to write to the appropriate Minister about his retail park, which is clearly bugging him greatly; I would like to find out whether I can do anything to assist him in that.
	The hon. Member for Ludlow (Mr. Dunne) has during his parliamentary career been involved in some of the same Select Committees on which I have, as a Back-Bench Member, had the privilege to serve: the Treasury Committee and the Public Accounts Committee. He is clearly enjoying himself, and he made an extremely good speech on some of the reports he has been particularly involved in. I hope he continues to enjoy his membership of the Committee as much as I did.
	The hon. Gentleman made a point about hindsight and looking at things retrospectively—after the horse has bolted, so to speak. That is because the Committee looks at value-for-money issues. If the PAC wishes to change its remit, that is a matter for the House. The Committee would have to develop its views on that, and the House would then have to decide whether to agree to the change. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that it is important that accounting officers are questioned—my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby made this point, too—as the Committee has never concerned itself with policy, but deals with value for money and efficiency. That is an extremely important part of its focus.
	The hon. Member for Putney (Justine Greening) was right to highlight the strengths of the Committee's cross-party structure and the holistic approach it takes, and the importance of the focus on value for money and efficiency savings, which are at the heart of its work.
	The Chairman, the hon. Member for Gainsborough, drew our attention to the tax credits system. Tax credits provide support for 6 million families and take-up is now at unprecedented levels. The system has helped lift 600,000 people out of poverty since 1998-99. Figures published in March 2008 show that in 2005-06 take-up of the child tax credit was 82 per cent. with more than 90 per cent. of allocated money being claimed. Importantly, for those on incomes of less than £10,000, take-up is now at 96 per cent. For lone parents, it is now up to 95 per cent. Furthermore, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs has established the tax credits transformation programme to improve the services that families receive. That includes a new service that allows couples whose relationship has broken down to initiate a new single claim by making a single telephone call.
	We have also improved performance, so that far fewer overpayments are caused by processing or software error. Accuracy in processing and calculating awards has risen from 78.6 per cent. in 2003-04 to about 97 per cent. in 2006-07. HMRC has revised its code of practice on recovering overpayments, replacing the reasonable belief test with a clearer test that will set out customers' responsibilities for checking factual information. In effect, there is a contract of responsibility. For instance, the recipient is expected to check that the amount going into their bank account matches the amount in the award notice. As before, they will not be expected to check the calculation; that will be a relief to all Members in terms of our constituency surgery work. If there is an official error and customers meet their responsibilities, the overpayment should be written off. The change will mean a fairer balance of responsibilities between the customer and HMRC. The Government regret the amount of error and fraud. The clear intention is for them to be reduced. HMRC will set targets to reflect that intention during this year.
	Officials are working hard to publish at the earliest opportunity the Treasury minutes on tax credits that Members are awaiting. Although the delay is regrettable, I should add in mitigation that the record for meeting deadlines for such minutes is extremely good.
	Various hon. Members have mentioned the Government's efficiency programme. The Committee has, on several occasions, rightly focused on this ambitious programme and I welcome its support for what we are trying to achieve. I am, of course, aware of the Committee's concerns about the robustness of the efficiency gains identified by the Government. Hon. Members are of course right that the savings claimed need to be genuine and credible. However, we should not overlook the National Audit Office's view that
	"projects across the public sector are making significant improvements to the efficiency of public services".
	I hope that hon. Members on both sides of the House will welcome that view. Nor should we ignore the fact that the programme is the largest concerted and continuous efficiency drive embarked upon by any Government in modern times.
	By December last year, we had achieved some £23 billion of efficiency gains. Our target for the current comprehensive spending review period up to 2010-11 is to achieve another £30 billion of savings. We have already seen some 78,000 net reductions in staff numbers as well as 12,600 posts reallocated to the front line. We are incredibly proud of the dedication and professionalism shown by civil servants across the country who have accepted the message that the Government need to work smarter and faster to deliver public services.
	We are determined to seize opportunities to provide taxpayers with genuine value for money wherever possible. We are also on target to reach our target of relocating some 20,000 jobs from London and the south-east by 2010 and, by the end of last year, had already moved 15,700 posts to the rest of the United Kingdom. That good progress has strengthened local economies and enabled the civil service to tap into a broader pool of talented recruits from across our country. All nations and regions in the UK have benefited from these moves, with 3,275 posts moving to the north-west, 3,259 posts moving to Wales and 3,268 posts moving to Yorkshire and the Humber.
	Thirdly, I shall turn to financial accountability. Full and open financial transparency is an essential and defining characteristic of a modern parliamentary democracy. The PAC, supported by the NAO, continues to be at the heart of the scrutiny process in our democracy and its unstinting and challenging examination of the use of scarce public resources contributes to our story of accountability in the United Kingdom.
	The hon. Member for South Norfolk gave a dizzying list of PAC equivalents that he had managed to visit the world over on his travels, but pointed out that the UK version is still a world leader. However, Parliament and Government cannot afford to be complacent about financial scrutiny. This point was clearly recognised in the Liaison Committee's report, "Parliament and Government Finance—Financial Scrutiny", which was published just over three weeks ago, on 21 April, and which the Government welcome.
	We are particularly grateful for the Liaison Committee's support for what has become known as our alignment project, which the Prime Minister announced last July. The project aims to bring all the Government's publication of information about public spending into a common format. This comprises public spending plans, parliamentary estimates and published resource accounts. Implementation of the alignment project will make a significant contribution to greater transparency and accountability and will allow Parliament and the public to track more readily Government spending from planning and budgeting stages right through to actual out-turn. As a result, Parliament will enjoy greater financial control over departmental budgets and, at the same time, have clearer and better financial information on the efficacy of planned public spending.
	The PAC must share some of the credit for these reforms, as is evidenced in its welcome paper, "Improving Financial Scrutiny", published as far back as July 2006. Hon. Members will recall that my predecessor as Financial Secretary promised to work with Parliament in bringing about change in the public interest. The alignment project clearly demonstrates our commitment to this worthy ambition and the Government continue to look forward to working with Parliament to achieve our common goals.
	Turning from projects, I should like to reflect on the developments under way to modernise the NAO's governance structures—another matter referred to by the hon. Member for Gainsborough. Members have already welcomed the Public Accounts Commission's 15th report on the governance of the NAO. I should like to restate the Government's support for those reforms. We support the Public Accounts Commission's objective in establishing systems of governance and internal control at the NAO that are consistent with best practice but that do not fetter its ability to form completely independent judgments.
	The current governance arrangements for the NAO and the Comptroller and Auditor General give priority to independence at the expense of good governance. The Government believe that the Public Accounts Commission's report strikes the right balance between the Comptroller and Auditor General's independence and the governance expected of an organisation that operates in the 21st century, rather than perhaps the 18th or 19th centuries. The new governance arrangements will give the Comptroller and Auditor General and the NAO the authority that they need for the important work that they do and spur them to improved performance. As hon. Members will know, the Prime Minister agreed that such provisions would be included in the Constitutional Renewal Bill, which has now started its pre-legislative scrutiny under a Joint Committee. It is important that Parliament and the Government work in harmony towards our shared objectives.
	I understand the hon. Gentleman's enthusiasm for bringing about the agreed new governance arrangements at the NAO—a point that he made very powerfully in his speech today. However, the important thing is to settle on a robust governance structure and to ensure that it commands the public support that it must have for credibility.
	I should like to thank Tim Burr not only for agreeing to serve as the Comptroller and Auditor General until the reforms are completed and in place, but also for presiding over a seamless transition from the previous regime. That reflects his outstanding ability as a public servant. He is clearly demonstrating his ability to preside over the NAO in these times and to prepare it for the new governance arrangements.
	It has been a pleasure to listen to the debate today, and I congratulate all hon. Members on their contributions. Before I sit down, I should like to add my voice to those who have wished the outgoing Comptroller and Auditor General, Sir John Bourn, under whom I served two terms as a Back-Bench member of the Public Accounts Committee, a long and happy retirement.

Nigel Evans: I am delighted to have this opportunity to raise an issue that should be of interest to everyone in the House, although I suspect that many Members do not even know that the scam I shall describe is going on. There are people who are ignorant of the fact that they are victims of boiler room fraud. I am delighted that today's business finished a little early, because it gives the Solicitor-General and me the luxury of a little more time to elaborate, to fully explore the issue, and to identify what we all ought to do to ensure that people are properly protected. I am chairman of the all-party identity fraud group; that is how the scam was brought to my attention. I am grateful to see that the Solicitor-General is present. That gives an important signal that the Government intend to take the issue very seriously.
	In the past few days, I have mentioned the debate to a number of MPs, and others have seen it announced on the Annunciator. Some of them thought that it had something to do with plumbing. They had not the faintest idea what boiler room fraud was. They asked, "What's that all about, then, Nigel?" When I explained it to them, they took it very seriously. They went white when they realised the scale of the problem.
	Boiler room fraud is a big crime, yet not many people know about it. The police have called it the biggest fraud threat to households. It is even bigger than credit card fraud. The estimated loss last year was more than £500 million. One estimate puts the figure close to £1 billion. The fact is that nobody really knows what the top-level figure is, because, as I said earlier, not everybody involved knows that they are a victim.
	Boiler room fraud is the name given to share investment scams—mostly share investment scams—where crooks posing as brokers use high pressure marketing techniques to sell investors shares that turn out to be worthless. This usually happens over the telephone, and usually the victims are cold-called—they receive calls that they have not initiated. The shares might be shares in real companies, but they are sold above the market price and turn out to be highly illiquid, preventing the investor from selling them on, but as often as not, investors are sold shares in companies that do not even exist.
	The criminals will do anything to part victims from their money, including lying, cheating and threatening. They are persistent and they are ruthless. The conmen who operate the boiler rooms try to locate themselves beyond the reach of UK law enforcement. Many of the boiler rooms targeting the UK appear to be located in Spain. The police estimate there are around 400 boiler rooms operating in Spain, employing over 600 people. They earn big money. I should not use the word "earn"—they steal big money.
	Other popular locations for boiler rooms are the USA, Dubai, Berlin, France—they can operate from anywhere. In this era of the telephone, fax and email, a boiler room can be located anywhere in the world, and tracking them down can be difficult, because they are dishonest about their true location.
	Many boiler rooms go to great lengths to build up a believable facade of respectability. They choose respectable names such as Bayer Investments, Legacy International, and Total Asset Management, which all sound legitimate. They might have a UK telephone number, but this can just be a forwarding service to anywhere in the world.
	The people used by boiler rooms are highly trained to con victims out of their money. They have posh British accents or American accents, and many of them adopt what may seem to be Biblical names so that people will trust them from the beginning. Mostly, the names are false. Boiler rooms hire young people by advertising in newspapers to get them to come to Spain—I shall use Spain as an example because it seems to be very popular. The advertisement invites young people to come and work in Spain as a financial adviser, or young people may be recruited at employment fairs and lured into a job. In some cases their passports are taken from them when they arrive in the country, and they are threatened that they had better not tell anyone what they are doing. It is frightening.
	My advice to newspapers is to take more responsibility for the advertisements that they accept. I also have advice for parents. Boiler room conmen seem to be picking on gap year students—young people between school and university, or those who have just left university—or young people who happen to be out in Spain already, who see people coming to bars flashing lots of money and driving fancy cars. That seems attractive to them.
	I advise parents to pay more attention to what their youngsters get up to in their gap year. They should investigate far more thoroughly what their jobs are all about, because if a young person is offered a job as a financial adviser working abroad, the chances are that it is one of these scams.
	The youngsters have to learn a script. They are drilled and trained thoroughly so that they sound believable. They do their homework about their would-be victims. They look up share registers to find out whether people regularly invest in shares, and the sort of shares that they invest in. They go so far as looking through yachting magazines or car magazines such as  Auto Trader to find out who is selling those items. They know that if those people sell their car or yacht, they will shortly have a few thousand pounds in their pocket, and their telephone number may appear in the magazine, so the conman has all the information necessary to try to part them from their cash.
	Why have I called for this debate? Members and their constituents might wonder, given that the crime is not new. I have done so because only very recently has the massive scale of the crime become apparent in the UK. I first heard about it when I was contacted by BBC Radio 4's "You and Yours" programme for a comment. Reporter Shari Vahl has conducted an investigation into boiler room fraud for the past two years; I pay tribute to her determination and doggedness and to "You and Yours" for raising this issue. Every time it is mentioned on the radio or television, the police are inundated with mail, phone calls and e-mails from people who have finally concluded that they have been conned. The more we get the issue on the TV or in newspapers, the more people will come forward with their own evidence.
	Even the police have been shocked by the scale of the crime. One officer on the case has admitted that the problem is much bigger than he had realised. I am sure that the majority of hon. Members have constituents who have been affected. I suspect that even today some of our constituents will have written cheques to send the con men; some may not yet have sent the cheques. One clear piece of advice would be that they should not send that cheque, no matter what harassment they are getting from the con men, but seek independent financial advice today—otherwise they will be the next victims. The con men may well lie low for a little bit while there is more publicity about this issue, but then they will come back again; as one boiler room closes down, another opens. The con men are persistent.
	I want the Financial Services Authority to do more and the police to be given more resources, more training and better guidance. I have nothing but praise for the City of London police. I was with them today, and they are clearly focusing on and specialising in this scam. Other police forces, however, will not be up to speed with what is going on; I shall give examples of that later.
	Boiler room fraud has been called a billion-pound business by an insider. As I said, that figure is hard for the police to verify, but they admit that they are merely scratching the surface of the problem. The police have given the figure of £500 million, which reflects the boiler room fraud that they know of. A senior fraud squad officer said:
	"I've never dealt with a crime where there are such consistently high losses and so many victims. There's a tidal wave of grief coming from these people."
	Here are some examples that give an idea of the scale of the problem. In the past two months, the FBI in Florida raided a $50 million boiler room based in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Twenty people were arrested. There are known to be thousands of victims of that one boiler room, and all are thought to be British. In another recent case, a British fraudster was arrested in the United States of America. This man, Mr. Gunter, and his daughter, had an estimated 15,000 British victims. He stole about £16 million.
	Whom do boiler rooms target? Boiler room fraud is causing untold harm to ordinary people trying hard to save money for their retirement or to put their children through university. People even borrow money to invest in some of these scams—and when they think that they are on to a good thing, they tell their friends about it, and their friends invest as well. The issue is not about reckless city traders gambling on the stock markets with other people's money; the people involved are victims of professional, clever crooks.
	It is important to emphasise that this is not a crime that happens to stupid, greedy people with more money than sense. I know that a lot of us find it rather hard to believe that someone can get cold-called and, in a matter of months, start to part with thousands of pounds. We think, "I wouldn't do that, so why would anyone else?" We have not had the telephone call from those professional con men, so, fortunately, the vast majority do not know what it is like to be on the receiving end.
	One of the biggest misconceptions about boiler room fraud, which needs to be dispelled, is that its victims are stupid and greedy. The criminals play sophisticated tricks to steal people's money. Even when money has been stolen—when people find that the shares that they bought were worthless or when they do not do as well as expected—the fraudsters come back. People think, "I can make up my losses." It is just like the old casino stuff. People will part with even more money to try to get their money back.
	Victims who have recently come forward to tell their stories are intelligent, educated people. They include university professors, architects and lawyers. I even know of one case where an independent financial adviser lost £20,000. Part of the problem is that people are embarrassed, and that is why we have not scratched the surface of the problem. Not everyone tells their wife or husband what they are doing with the money. I know of one case where the victim kept it secret and lied about how much money they were investing. Victims are embarrassed when they find out that they have lost all the money. In some cases, they will not even go to the police and report the crime. I say to anyone who has been a victim of boiler room fraud, "Please go to the police and ensure that they know about it." It should not be kept secret.
	The criminals tend to pick on elderly people, although they do not do so exclusively. Sons, daughters and relatives should advise parents and grandparents about the scam. They should tell them what is going on and ensure that they have not been taking any cold calls whatsoever, let alone starting to invest their money with so-called brokers who are only out to steal it. It goes the other way, too. Parents should ensure that their sons, daughters and other younger relatives know about these scams. Everybody should tell everybody else about the scams, or else they could find that their relatives are soon victims.

Vera Baird: I congratulate the hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Mr. Evans) on securing this debate and on bringing this extremely serious issue before the House. I also congratulate him on his pursuit of the issue in his speech and through the all-party parliamentary group that he leads with the vigour that he has shown today. I thank him further for the unusual step, which should be taken more frequently, of kindly letting me have a summary of what he wanted to say, so that I knew in advance the points he wanted me to tackle. That is a better way of ensuring that we have a good debate than leaving things a mystery and providing the questions all at the last minute.
	I agree entirely with what the hon. Gentleman said about the misleading nature of the name boiler room fraud, which does tend to make one think of central heating or ballcocks although it concerns things that are much more venal than that. The cost of fraud is devastating and affects us all. Fraud against business does not just drive up costs for consumers; the cases of Enron, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International and Barlow Clowes show that it puts whole communities at risk. The Government, too, are a regular victim of fraud, and when they are, fraudsters are robbing taxpayers of the modern public services that they have paid for. As the hon. Gentleman has shown, the fraudster's victim of choice will often come from among our most vulnerable citizens, who are targeted for their life savings and their livelihoods.
	Boiler room fraud shows that although fraudsters' methods may be complex, internationally organised and highly sophisticated, their motive is just simple criminal profit—deliberate, cruel and totally unchecked by any compassion for victims. Numbers are very hard to determine, as the hon. Gentleman said. We get about 100 new victims of boiler room fraud contacting the police each week. Losses range from £3,000 to more than £1 million—a very substantial amount for an individual. The Financial Services Authority estimates that about 2,000 victims contact it each year, with average losses of about £20,000.
	The human cost, as well as the financial cost, is often appalling, as the hon. Gentleman's examples showed. I am glad to hear that he has visited the City of London police; the Attorney-General and I went there a month ago, and indeed, we found them impressive, as the hon. Gentleman clearly did. The appalling story he was told of the lady whose husband was driven to suicide—he lost his life savings of about £200,000 and was obviously completely unable to live with that fact—is a human tragedy of matchless proportions. Another caller to the City of London just sobbed on the telephone and could not explain to the officer at that time any detail of what had happened; she was clearly devastated. One man in his 80s had lost more than £400,000 and was about to buy some more worthless shares when the City of London police were apprised of the scam and arranged for an officer in his local force, which was in Scotland, to explain to him what was happening and head it off.
	Those are the depths to which the fraudsters sink. Amazingly, it is not generally seen as evil crime, like violent crime, rape or armed robbery, but it does massive damage to people's lives. For people to lose the cash that they and their family were depending on for the future produces shame and guilt, and there will be massive under-reporting because such feelings are an ordinary human reaction. People suffer a loss of faith in their own judgment and a loss of self-esteem, all of which is massively more injurious to health than a punch on the nose in the street.
	It is a very serious crime that the Government take very seriously, and the risks are rising fast for the perpetrators of such crimes. In recent months, a multi-agency taskforce, co-ordinated by the City of London police, joining with key agencies such as the Serious Organised Crime Agency, the Serious Fraud Office and the FSA, has become increasingly public in its work. That is Operation Archway, about which the hon. Gentleman has spoken. It provides a contact point for victims and a concentrated pool of expertise that turns national intelligence about boiler room fraudsters into action against them.
	I acknowledge the hon. Gentleman's concerns about whether local police are the appropriate people to tackle the issue internationally. However, Operation Archway has worked fluidly across borders, with operations, supporting action and arrests by international partners in the US, Ireland, Hong Kong, Singapore and Gibraltar so far. In the example that he mentioned, the father and daughter who were suspected of boiler room fraud totalling £35 million to £50 million were indeed arrested in the US, but that was with the critical assistance of the City of London police who were safeguarding British victims. Numerous people have been detained in this country and abroad over the past year, as part of seven major multi-agency operations against boiler rooms. For instance, last week, an arrest operation across five English counties produced a series of arrests of both men and women who were engaged in boiler room fraud.
	Although such operations are vital in increasing the risks for fraudsters, parallel efforts are helping to remove their rewards, by tracing, freezing and seizing their stolen assets around the world. Letting fraudsters know that they will not be able to keep their ill-gotten gains is the way to get to the heart of the problem. Anti-money laundering specialists in the City of London police—I will come to more police forces in a moment—found assets in the US, Canada, Belize, Nevis, Cyprus, Tanzania, Lebanon, Latvia and, despite what the hon. Gentleman said, Spain.
	The Government's major reforms have in recent years put criminal assets at risk in a major way, as they never have been before. We have introduced tough asset recovery powers. They were not universally supported as they went through the House, because they appeared at first sight to be quite draconian, but they are working. Those powers are popular and are becoming increasingly tough in their implementation. Financial investigation is becoming an increasingly mainstream part of police work. We are aiming to make the UK a tougher target for boiler room fraud.
	Contrary to the hon. Gentleman's concerns about local police forces and the absence of fraud officers in some places, I am pleased to say that every police force in the country has contacted Operation Archway for advice and support. Those forces will be referring to Archway complainants in inquiries that Archway is taking on. However, local forces are simultaneously taking away advice and support to build up their own capacity, so that they can better tackle such crimes nationwide. There is, I am fairly sure, an element of regionalisation in the location of fraud officers, so that that expertise builds up in bodies that deal with such issues regularly.
	We are, however, taking the challenge to boiler room fraudsters beyond the operational front line. We will use all the tools in our power to protect the public and will acquire new ones where necessary. The fairly recent Fraud Act 2006 has brought about a major simplification of legislation on fraud, which is helping to get boiler room fraudsters to justice more quickly. Over-complex law is a recipe for criminals who are used to scheming in the first instance to try to play the system and extend trials. Fraud law is "relatively straightforward", or at least much more so than it used to be, so that people can see where it is going and jurors can better understand it. As the hon. Gentleman will know, we are holding a public consultation on the implementation of a plea negotiation framework, to enhance the ability of prosecutors to get an early settlement in what might otherwise be complex and lengthy trials.
	The Financial Services Authority is not a part of the Government for me to defend or criticise. Essentially, it is an independent authority. However, the hon. Gentleman has put what he wanted to say about the FSA very courteously in this debate. I have read a press releases by him in which he said that it was time that the FSA got its finger out. I am never one to avoid mixing my metaphors, but the FSA would say that it was "all hands on deck". The FSA regards itself as being tough in supervising the UK framework of financial regulations and has used its powers to shut down any firm in the UK that has helped boiler rooms, closing seven firms last year, with two people subsequently reported to the police for arrest. A solicitor who had authorised adverts promoting boiler rooms was fined £150,000 and is, I hope, currently in the middle of disciplinary proceedings.
	The FSA would say that it is building coalitions against the fraudster with its sister agencies overseas. Co-operation between the FSA and its counterparts in Ontario and British Columbia has helped to recover £1 million of UK victims' funds. We have to do things all ways. It is fine to simplify prosecutions and to make arrests, but that is after the event, and the money is often a long way away by the time we get to that stage. It is therefore important to think not only about prevention but about earlier intervention, when the money will not be so far away from concealment and might be easier to recover. It would save people who have suffered from that fraud from being demoralised if they realised that they were not alone. It helps them to realise that the fraud is happening across the board, and that they are not so foolish as they think when they self-stigmatise.
	We are trying to take action across the board to hold fraudsters who prey on British victims to account, wherever they try to hide. We have to look at prevention, deterrents and detection, as well as disruption. The key agencies with responsibility have taken new steps to make boiler room fraud harder to commit. The FSA shares its intelligence by listing suspected boiler rooms, and its website is much visited, so I think that the hon. Gentleman must have found only one or two pages that were relevant. About 18 new firms are listed each month on the website, which appears to have received a substantial number of hits. The FSA has also shut down sites that are run by suspected boiler rooms.
	The hon. Gentleman talked about working with share registrar companies. We understand, from the FSA, that it works with such companies to include preventive advice as part of the annual reports of legitimate companies, because—we agree on this much at least—people who are already shareholders are commonly the victims of this fraud. The FSA informs us that it is doing that, but, in view of the hon. Gentleman's comments and the correspondence that he has had, we will go back to it to ask about this. I will write to him to ascertain that I am not in danger of misleading anyone by saying that the FSA is confident that it is spreading information to the people who are most commonly victims.
	The FSA takes an up-front role in media activities, working with local and regional radio, TV news programmes and features, and print media. The list gets longer every week. It has not excluded the national press, but people take note of what happened to Mrs. Smith up the street, so they are more likely to be put on notice by something local than by something that they read about nationally.
	The FSA also runs a website called "Money made clear", which is intended to be a public awareness site that rolls out material to raise public awareness about all kinds of scams and swindles, including boiler room frauds. It has a contact centre for people who respond to what they see on the site and who might, as the hon. Gentleman said, appreciate for the first time that they are in the middle of something and so not write the cheque that someone has been trying to get them to write.
	We will build on such progress more centrally in the months ahead. The hon. Gentleman mentioned the new institutions that we are setting up. Fraud has never been higher on the agenda, and the major reforms that he mentioned are under way to make the UK a tougher target for all kinds of fraud, including boiler room fraud. Concerted action is needed to tackle the threat, and not just from the Government. Action is also needed from criminal justice practitioners, charities, business, all the regulators and all the public. They each have a vital role to play and a stake in each others' success.
	As the hon. Gentleman knows, the Government have carried out a fraud review, consulting widely and getting a substantial response. They are driving forward with major changes that are backed by new funding. He asked for reassurance about that: £28 million was allocated for the new institutions in the comprehensive spending review. That funding must be added to the money that already goes to the Serious Fraud Office, which receives both core funding and what is known as blockbuster funding for individual cases. The Crown Prosecution Service has a fraud prosecutions division, which is accumulating a body of expertise. The Revenue and Customs prosecution office prosecutes fraud, as do the Departments for Work and Pensions and for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. The funding—which will go to different institutions, and also boost the investigation and prosecution arm—is in addition to all of that. The reform programme is not just about prosecuting; it is about concerted action.
	The national fraud strategic authority will deliver on the core recommendations resulting from the responses to the consultation. It reports directly to Ministers. The hon. Gentleman asked me when I last had contact with—he was pleased to say—my Cabinet colleagues. There were important Ministers present at the time, and I am in the group. The Attorney-General, who does attend Cabinet, is also in the group, as are all the Ministers to whom the hon. Gentleman referred.
	The strategic authority has a mandate to develop a national strategy on fraud that, interestingly, involves setting out a vision of success. This is not a straightforward process; it is important that there should be prosecutions and convictions, but they are after the event for the victims, and asset recovery is absolutely key. Perhaps we should judge the success at least partly by the increasing number of reports. People are often unwilling to report this kind of fraud, but an increase in reporting would make it look as though it was escalating. There will be elements of that, I am sure, and the incidence of fraud will look as though it has gone up when the proposals get on their feet. However, if the strategic authority can set out a vision of what success means, it will be able to develop a national strategy for fraud. There will be a programme of action that involves deterrence, prevention, detection, investigation, sanctions for perpetrators and redress for victims.
	A further important component is the national fraud reporting centre, which will have to set up strong links with industry, business and other law enforcement agencies, so as to receive reports. It will need to have networks and tentacles everywhere, so that when Mr. Jones in Redcar makes a report, it will know that that is a problem not only in Redcar and that there have also been examples in Ribble Valley, for example, and elsewhere. It will then work with intelligence analysts, who will work out, from the individual reports, a better picture of the networks involved, their techniques and the opportunities to bring them to book. It will then send back to the institutions involved—the banks, businesses or whatever—the recipe to deal with the problem.